There is a lot of hype about personalized medicine and it makes sense that gender must be taken into account when considering how we diagnose, treat and prescribe.

When it comes to medical research, diagnostics and treatment, men and women are still often treated as virtually the same. And the medical profession has, until recent years, thought what was good for the goose was good for the gander.  It turns out that what we need is a double standard.

One area where there is a great need for gender specific medicine is heart disease—the leading cause of death for American women. One in 3 women die due to heart disease. In fact, heart disease kills more women than all cancers combined.

The diagnosis of heart attacks in women is so different than for men that women are very often misdiagnosed. In a 1987 study of heart patients whose test results were abnormal, doctors were twice as likely to attribute the women’s symptoms to psychiatric or other non-cardiac causes.

According to the Harvard Medical School teaching hospital Beth Israel Deaconess, over 40% of women do not survive their first heart attack. This makes heart disease prevention a national priority, especially for women. Information on women and heart disease can be found at www.TMforWomensHeartHealth.org

Important gender differences are already being looked at in the following areas: stem cells, the brain, diabetes, addiction, stroke, depression, cancer, liver diseases, osteoporosis and pharmacology.  You cannot create a personalized medicine system until you at least split the population in half.

Aspirin for example, has a different benefit for women than it does for men. Aspirin cuts men’s risk of heart attack by 32%, but not their risk of stroke. By contrast, aspirin cuts women’s risk of stroke by 17%, but not their risk of heart attack.

Early last year the FDA cut the recommended dose for women of the popular sleep drug Ambien because women metabolize it differently, with 45% more of it remaining in a woman’s body the next day. Women have been overdosing on Ambien for 20 years.

Women taking antidepressants and antipsychotics tend to have higher drug concentrations in their blood than men do. Women also require half as much influenza vaccine for the same level of protection, though they are always given the same dosage as men.

Eight out of 10 prescription drugs pulled  from the U.S. market from 1997 to 2001 caused more side effects in women.

Some say medical research is like Swiss cheese, with the holes representing data on women’s health. Traditionally, research has been done almost entirely on men and those conclusions were then applied to both men and women. Even though the law now requires that women be included in studies, the gender-different results are almost never analyzed. Instead, the results are blended. This is detrimental to both men and women. For 25 years the Society for Women’s Health Research fought for more research on the different risk factors for each gender

Perhaps now is the time for everything in research and medicine to be reviewed in the light of potentially significant gender differences.

Vanessa Vidal is the National Director for the non-profit Transcendental Meditation Women’s organization in the USA.

You can find Vanessa and the Transcendental Meditation Women’s organization on Twitter, Facebook,Pinterest and LinkedIn, or on their website, www.tm-women.org